Goddard a case study in crisis

Tuesday

Feb 22, 2011 at 6:00 AM

By Patrick O’Connor

I feel obliged to speak up regarding the recent events at the Goddard School of Science and Technology.

I am stunned. I am alarmed. I am writing to raise questions about the direction and quality of education in our country and in the Worcester public schools. I believe and hope that moral reasoning and reflection can somehow be integrated into the school practices and the school experiences of our administrators, teachers and students, despite our present preoccupation with the narrow focus on testing and achievement outcomes.

I write as a former teacher of English at South High School and chair of the English Department at North High School. I have great respect and considerable fondness for the many teaching colleagues I worked with for over 30 years in Worcester.

During my career in Worcester, I had the privilege to teach over 4,000 high school students. Indeed, it was this experience and these students that have allowed me to continue to teach — effectively I trust — in my present position as professor of education at Worcester State University. I now have the responsibility to prepare undergraduates and graduate students for secondary school teaching.

Unfortunately, the recent report by Mitchell Chester and the policies of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have resulted in a colossal embarrassment, and a serious indictment of the work of the teachers at the Goddard School and, by extension, the classroom efforts of all Worcester public school teachers.

Their reputations are now placed under a cloud of suspicion and doubt. The joint investigation by state and local officials that declared null and void all the results in grades 3 through 6 for 2010 in English language arts, mathematics, and science and technology must be confronted and addressed.

I am stupefied by the vote of the four members of the Worcester School Committee, including the mayor, who chose to “get on with our business,” rather than search for the truth behind this testing debacle. Don’t these four policy experts realize that the fog of doubt and accusation that has enveloped Goddard teachers can only be lifted by a comprehensive investigation by concerned local educators and citizens?

Merely placing blame and heaping scorn on teachers and administrators at Goddard, however, is too easy a response to a complex situation. In my remaining remarks, I will try to bring a larger perspective to what is at stake for public school teachers and students in our current system and what lessons may be learned from the state’s finding “of irregularities in test administration protocol” at the Goddard School.

What has happened to the promise represented by standards-based reform?

Unfortunately, the No Child Left Behind law (2001), the driving force behind standards-based reform, has resulted in two very different educational approaches to teaching and learning in public schools: one, a very powerful and promising idea, authentic standards; and the other, a more narrow, technical focus on testing and test preparation.

The NCLB law has its problems, but I believe something like this law was needed and is needed, especially in our urban schools. I think its greatest force, however, will likely come from its proper implementation. But events like those at the Goddard School (and other schools) cause me to worry that its implementation has morphed into a reliance on high-stakes testing, an approach that I view as the evil twin of authentic reform. This evil twin, high-stakes testing, has allowed the standards movement to become its own worst enemy.

Moreover, the high-stakes testing culture has wreaked havoc with our educational system, causing irreversible harm to many of our nation’s schools, students, and teachers. Does this high-stakes culture help to explain the events at Goddard? Perhaps so, but, at a minimum, attention must be paid.

We know that this overemphasis on test scores is wrong. We know that education is about learning. Teaching that does not lead to students wanting to learn more is, by and large, a wasted effort. Teaching that focuses on getting students to score higher, rather than to learn more, makes a mockery of our noble profession.

This is a lesson that can be taken from Goddard. Once teachers let the educational bureaucrats fool them into thinking that their job is primarily about student achievement scores, they have lost the struggle for true education. I fear that events are pushing us down the road of becoming not educators, but mere Kaplan coaches where our students become surface learners and grade grubbers — and our teachers become compliant functionaries.

This is an educational crisis we all need to be concerned about.

Patrick O’Connor is professor of education at Worcester State University.

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